Environmental controls on stable isotopes of precipitation in Lanzhou, China: An enhanced network at city scale

Stable hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in precipitation are very sensitive to environmental changes, and can record evolution of water cycle. The Lanzhou city in northwestern China is jointly influenced by the monsoon and westerlies, which is considered as a vital platform to investigate the moisture regime for this region. Since 2011, an observation network of stable isotopes in precipitation was established across the city, and four stations were included in the network. In 2013, six more sampling stations were added, and the enhanced network might provide more meaningful information on spatial incoherence and synoptic process. This study focused on the variations of stable isotopes (delta O-18 and delta D) in precipitation and the environmental controls based on the 1432 samples in this enhanced network from April 2011 to October 2014. The results showed that the precipitation isotopes had great spatial diversity, and the neighboring stations may present large difference in dD and d18O. Based on the observation at ten sampling sites, an isoscape in precipitation was calculated, and the method is useful to produce isoscape for small domains. The temperature effect and amount effect was reconsidered based on the dataset. Taking meteorological parameters (temperature, precipitation amount, relative humidity, water vapor pressure and dew point temperature) as variables in a multi-linear regression, the result of coefficients for these meteorological parameters were calculated. Some cases were also involved in this study, and the isotopic characteristics during one event or continuous days were used to understand the environmental controls on precipitation isotopes. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.